This article applies to England, Wales and Scotland.
In brief: Employment tribunal decisions for England, Wales and Scotland from February 2017 onwards are published free at gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions. The register holds over 133,000 decisions and can be filtered by country, jurisdiction code and decision date. It does not record outcomes or award amounts as searchable data.
Last updated: August 2026
By Yerty | This guide was created using analysis of tribunal cases and official ACAS/Gov.uk guidance.
Employment tribunals sit in public and their decisions are published on a free government register. Very few people know it exists, including a good number of people who are in the middle of a claim.
This guide covers how to search that register properly, how to read what you find, where its limits sit, and what to do when the question you have cannot be answered by it.
Important: This guide provides information about UK employment law. Yerty is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Decisions describe what happened in other cases and are not a guide to what will happen in yours.
Where Employment Tribunal Decisions Are Published
The public register is at gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions. It is free, needs no account, and covers first-instance employment tribunal decisions in England, Wales and Scotland from February 2017 onwards. As of August 2026 it held 133,530 decisions.
Judgments are placed on the register under the tribunal rules, along with any written reasons. Decisions are not affected by GDPR rules and cannot be removed on request, which is worth knowing in both directions: it is why the record is available to you, and why your own case would appear there too.
For decisions before February 2017 the register is not the route. Enquiries about older England and Wales judgments go to Norwich Magistrates' Court and Family Court, and older Scottish decisions to Glasgow Tribunals Centre.
Appeals are held elsewhere. Employment Appeal Tribunal decisions, which are the ones that create binding law, are published separately and are not part of this register.
How to Search the Register
The search page gives you a free-text box and three filters.
Country splits England and Wales from Scotland.
Jurisdiction code is the useful one. It is a list of around fifty claim categories covering Unfair Dismissal, Disability Discrimination, Race Discrimination, Sex Discrimination, Age Discrimination, Public Interest Disclosure, Unlawful Deduction from Wages, Redundancy, Working Time Regulations, Breach of Contract, Maternity and Pregnancy Rights, Transfer of Undertakings, Jurisdictional Points and Practice and Procedure Issues, among others. Selecting one narrows the register to decisions tagged with that category.
Decision date takes an after and a before value, and accepts either a year or a full date.
The free-text box searches case titles, so it works well for a claimant or respondent name and less well for a concept. Searching a phrase like "reasonable adjustments" will not reliably surface every case about reasonable adjustments, because the register is not built for full-text retrieval across judgment PDFs.
A worked search
Say you want decisions involving disability discrimination at a retail employer, to get a sense of how those cases run.
- Open the register and select England and Wales under Country.
- Under Jurisdiction code, select Disability Discrimination.
- Set Decision date after to 2024 so you are looking at recent practice.
- If you have a specific employer, type the company name into the search box. Try variations: a company may appear as "Marchgate Retail Ltd", "Marchgate Retail Limited", a trading name preceded by "T/a", or a differently named group entity that was the actual employer. Check Companies House for the registered name if the search comes up empty.
- Work through the results, opening the decisions that look relevant.
That last step is where the work sits. Results give you the case name, the words "Employment Tribunal decision", and the decision date. There is no summary, no outcome and no indication of what the case was about beyond the jurisdiction code, so finding relevant material means opening judgments one at a time.
Two practical touches. The register offers email alerts and an Atom feed, so if you are tracking a particular employer or category you can subscribe rather than checking manually. And the default result ordering is not chronological, so filtering by date is more reliable than scrolling.
How to Read a Decision Once You Have Found It
The case number tells you something. In a reference like 3302815/2024, the year after the slash is when the claim was lodged. Compare that with the decision date and you have a rough measure of how long the case took. It is common to see 2024 claim numbers with 2026 decision dates.
"And Others" means multiple parties. Cases appear once on the register even where several claimants brought linked claims, so one entry can represent a group.
A judgment and written reasons are different documents. The judgment states the outcome. Written reasons explain it, and they are provided where a party requests them or the tribunal reserves its decision. A bare judgment may tell you a claim succeeded without telling you why, which limits how much you can learn from it.
The outcome vocabulary is inconsistent. Judgments variously record claims as well-founded, upheld, upheld in part, dismissed, dismissed on withdrawal, struck out or dismissed for want of jurisdiction. Those are different things. A claim dismissed because it was brought out of time tells you nothing about its merits, and reading a list of dismissals as a list of losses will give you a distorted picture.
Remedy is often a separate document. Liability and compensation are frequently decided at different hearings, so the judgment finding in a claimant's favour may contain no figure at all, with the award appearing in a later document. In Yerty's analysis of the published record, a substantial minority of cases carry money in more than one document, which is a common trap when reading a single judgment and assuming it holds the whole story.
What the Register Cannot Do
The register was built to publish decisions, not to answer research questions. Six limits matter in practice.
There is no outcome field. Nothing in the search interface tells you whether a claim succeeded. To know, you open the document and read it.
There are no award amounts. You cannot filter by compensation, sort by it, or find the highest awards in a category. Every figure is inside a PDF.
You cannot search by facts. The question most people actually have is some version of "what happened in cases like mine". The register cannot answer it, because circumstances are not indexed. Jurisdiction code tells you what was claimed, not what the case was about or how it turned out.
You cannot count anything. With 133,530 decisions spread across more than 2,600 pages of results, questions like how often a claim type succeeds or what a typical award comes to are not answerable by browsing, however long you spend.
Settled and withdrawn cases are largely invisible. Most claims never reach a judgment, so the register shows the minority that were fought to a conclusion. Anyone using it to gauge what usually happens is looking at an unrepresentative slice.
Some cases are anonymised or restricted. Tribunals can make orders anonymising parties or restricting publication, which is right in the circumstances where it applies and means the record is not quite complete.
None of this is a criticism of the register. Publishing 133,000 decisions free of charge is a genuine open justice achievement. It just means the register answers "what did this case say" rather than "how often, how much, compared to what".
When You Need Something the Register Cannot Give You
If your question is about a specific case, a named employer or a particular judge, the register is the right tool and the steps above will get you there.
If your question is comparative, it will not. Take the worked search above. On the register, "how do disability discrimination claims at retailers tend to go" means selecting a jurisdiction code, then opening judgments one after another, reading each one to find out whether it succeeded, noting any award by hand, and stopping when you run out of patience rather than when you have an answer. The same question asked of the record as structured data is a filter: claim type, sector, date range, returning outcomes, award ranges and time from claim to decision across every case at once, each figure still traceable to its judgment.
The difference is not how hard you are willing to read. It is whether the 133,000 decisions exist as a list of links or as fields you can query.
One thing worth avoiding: asking a general-purpose AI chatbot for tribunal cases. Language models invent plausible-looking case names and citations, and a fabricated authority put in front of a tribunal causes real problems. Our guide on the risks of using ChatGPT in an employment dispute covers what goes wrong. Anything you rely on should be traceable to a document you can open.
What to Do Next
If you are researching cases for your own claim, options may include:
- Start with the register at gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions, filtered by jurisdiction code and date
- Search your employer's exact registered name, and its trading and group variations
- Set up an email alert if you want to keep tracking a category or employer
- Read the written reasons, not just the judgment, where they exist, and note whether a separate schedule of loss or remedy document is referred to
- Keep a note of what you find, with case numbers, so you can point to the source later
- Move to structured search once the question becomes comparative rather than specific
For a wider picture of what the tribunal record shows, see our guides to employment tribunal success rates and what a tribunal claim is worth. For how the process works from ET1 onwards, see our guide to employment tribunal claims.
How Yerty Can Help
Yerty Intelligence Hub reads the published tribunal record into structured, searchable fields, so outcomes, awards, timelines and respondents can be filtered and compared rather than opened one PDF at a time. Every figure traces back to the judgment it came from. Explore the Intelligence Hub to search the record by what you actually want to know.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are employment tribunal decisions public?
Yes. Employment tribunals sit in public and judgments are published on a free government register at gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions, covering England, Wales and Scotland from February 2017 onwards. Decisions cannot be removed from the register at a party's request.
How do I search for employment tribunal cases against a company?
Use the free-text search on the government register with the employer's name, filtered by country and decision date. Company names appear in several forms, so try the registered name, any trading name and any group entity that may have been the legal employer.
Can I find out how much a tribunal awarded in a case?
Only by opening the decision and reading it. The register holds no searchable award data. Compensation is often decided at a separate remedy hearing, so the figure may sit in a later document rather than the judgment you first find.
How far back does the tribunal decisions register go?
To February 2017, with some earlier decisions included. For older England and Wales judgments, enquiries go to Norwich Magistrates' Court and Family Court; for older Scottish decisions, to Glasgow Tribunals Centre.
Will my own employment tribunal case appear online?
If your claim reaches a judgment, it will normally be published on the register with the parties named, and it cannot be removed on request. Tribunals can make anonymity or restricted reporting orders, but only where specific legal conditions are met.
Can I search tribunal decisions by what happened rather than by name?
Not on the register. You can filter by jurisdiction code, which records the type of claim brought, but circumstances are not indexed and full-text searching across judgment PDFs is not supported.
What is the difference between a judgment and written reasons?
The judgment records the outcome. Written reasons explain the tribunal's reasoning and are produced where a party requests them or the decision is reserved. A judgment alone may confirm a claim succeeded without setting out why.
Are Employment Appeal Tribunal decisions on the same register?
No. The register covers first-instance employment tribunal decisions. Employment Appeal Tribunal judgments, which set binding precedent, are published separately.
Sources
- "Employment tribunal decisions", HM Courts & Tribunals Service, GOV.UK — https://www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions
- "Employment tribunals: the judgment (T426)", HM Courts & Tribunals Service — https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/employment-tribunal-hearings-judgment-guide-t426/employment-tribunals-the-judgement-t426
- "Employment tribunal data research privacy notice", Ministry of Justice — https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/employment-tribunal-data-research-privacy-notice
- "Making a claim to an employment tribunal", Acas — https://www.acas.org.uk/employment-tribunals
- Analysis of published Employment Tribunal decisions, Yerty Index — https://yerty.co.uk/yerty-index/methodology